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Charges vary from £6.95 to £25 a month, with these “added value” or “packaged accounts” offering competitive overdraft rates as well as discounts on services such as travel insurance.

Richard Kibble, a banking expert at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said banks had charged wealthy customers for managing their accounts since the mid-1990s, but were now considering rolling it out more broadly.

“We appear to be at a tipping point where it is likely that some sort of charge for a current account is seen as normal,” he said.

“The number of people who are paying fees of some form has risen quite significantly over the past decade. The UK is quite unusual by not having explicit charges, unlike Europe and the US.”

Analysts warn that banks — many of whom have received billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money — will be increasingly likely to charge a fee if, as expected, they lose their court battle against the Office of Fair Trading over excessive charging.

At the moment, customers who exceed overdraft limits without agreement can be hit with charges as high as 30 per cent of the amount they are overdrawn. Agreed overdraft rates have also risen.

In a ruling expected soon at the Supreme Court, the banks are expected to be told that they cannot levy such high charges. To recoup their losses, they are looking to charge customers a monthly or annual fee, enticing them with “special features”.

Vera Cottrell, a personal finance campaigner with Which?, the consumer group, claimed that many of the packaged accounts are poor value for money, with most customers not using the features.

“At the moment there is enough choice to avoid paying fees or having to have a particular income,” she said.

“It is something we would be concerned about if these choices were to disappear and consumers were forced to pay for something that is not good value.”

Lesley McLeod, an executive director of the British Bankers Association, said there are more added-value accounts on offer. “As long as there is choice out there and people are quite clear about what they are signing up to then we don’t see a problem with them,” she said.

Despite a tumultuous year, several banks have recently posted a profit.